Two ECU students, Anna Lawrence (undergraduate) and Ashley Meehan (graduate), won the “Best Paper Presentation Award” at the 13th Annual TESOL / Applied Linguistics Graduate Students Conference hosted at East Carolina University on February 13, 2016. Their paper, entitled Morphosyntactic Variation in an Emerging Dialect of Spanish in Eastern North Carolina, reports on findings from an ongoing study that investigates the formation of Spanish communities in the rural south. This research is being conducted under the mentorship of Dr. Stephen Fafulas, current Director of the SoCIOLing Lab.

Anna’s project, supported by the SoCIOLingLab is entitled, “Morphosyntactic variation in an emerging dialect of Spanish in eastern North Carolina”. Her work aims to discover the unique characteristics of spoken Spanish in the Hispanic communities of our region.

We are pleased to announce that SLINKI, Spanish Linguistics in North Carolina, will be hosted at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, on February 7, 2015. We invite abstracts for 20-minute presentations and for poster presentations, in any area related to Spanish Linguistics. While the focus of the conference is on work by researchers in North Carolina, we welcome all submissions. Sessions will be held throughout the day and will not be scheduled concurrently unless necessitated by the number of presenters. The poster session will be held during the lunch break.

As part of the SoCIOLing Lab’s mission to embrace the growing needs of the Hispanic population in our region and deepen relationships between students, schools, and community partners we are preparing for a three day visit with Dr. Kathryn Lindholm-Leary who will provide consultation on our research initiatives regarding bilingual education and dual-language programs in eastern NC.

Dr. Kathryn Lindholm-Leary is currently Professor Emerita of Child and Adolescent Development at San Jose State University. She has worked with two-way immersion and other foreign language and bilingual programs for the past 30 years and during that time has evaluated over 40 programs and helped to establish programs in over 60 school districts in 15 states. Dr. Lindholm-Leary regularly consults with various state and local departments of education.

On Thursday February 20th, Dr. Walt Wolfram (North Carolina State University) visited the SoCIOLing Lab and met with university faculty, students, and Lab members. Dr. Wolfram, who came to ECU to give a talk as part of the IMLD@ECU events, shared some of his experiences with the Lab members and learned about our current and future research projects.

We want to congratulate two of the SoCIOLing student members, Mario Becerra and Briceida Rodriguez, on their presentation last week at the Spanish Linguistics in North Carolina conference hosted at Appalachian State University.

Their project “A sociolinguistic analysis of morphosyntactic phenomena in the Spanish of Pitt County: A pilot study” is part of the SoCIOLing Lab’s ongoing initiative which analyzes different linguistic aspects of the Spanish spoken in Eastern North Carolina.